Shared Stuff is simple enough; users drag a “email share” button into their browser, and click it when they want to add pages to their Shared Stuff profile. Links can include an image, text extract, and/ or a user comment. The results can then be viewed directly, via iGoogle or RSS. An interesting addition is the option to use Shared Stuff to post links to other social booking sites as well, including Facebook Furl, Delicious, Reddit and Digg.

Friend can be invited by email, and bookmarks made by Gmail contacts using the service can be viewed as well.

Other aspects that make Shared Stuff more social includes a profile that you have limited, but valuable control. On your profile you have the ability to share your name, nickname, job, geographic location, short description (5,000 character max) and of course 10 links of your liking. Below you will see the profile section of a profile. As with many other social bookmarking sites, you can add a description and tags to help you manage your stuff and the ability to share your stuff via email and RSS/XML feeds.

Here is the new profile of the Google Shared Stuff

You just have to add a javascript link to your favorites on your browser, however there is no ability to add a button to your Google Toolbar which makes me think that they are really trying to keep the wraps on this new product.

Create bookmarks you can access anywhere
Bookmark your favorite websites and add labels and notes to them. Your labels and notes are searchable later, and you can access your bookmarks from any computer by signing in.

Save time with quick links to your favorite websites
Use Personalized Search to find the sites you visit frequently and bookmark your favorites. Use the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer for quick access to your bookmarks and to easily create more.

A good question is why would Google discard their bookmarks service rather than adding the social aspects of shared stuff to their existing product?

If you would like a walk through of the new service, check out BlogScoped’s post which includes screen shots and instructions.

Thanks for sharing this overview. I just stared using Shared Stuff and it’s not bad. But I don’t understand, as you alluded to, why the integration with other google stuff isn’t better. Why can’t they have the option to automatically import links to blogger, bookmarks, photos, YouTube and whatever other google services exist.

Joe,
Thanks for your comment. I did touch on the fact that Google already has a service for bookmarking, not a social product like shared stuff, however, my question is why they did not integrate these social aspects into an existing product. This would allow for users of the other service to share and would afford others the ability to keep their stuff to themselves. Similar to the Google Reader product where you can share what you want and highlight what you want (by adding a star) without publishing them. Just a thought…